Month: December 2019

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Lightning is such a common phenomenon that people often overlook just how powerful it is (provided it doesn't hit you, obviously). But over the past decade, research has gradually revealed just how extreme lightning is. This everyday phenomenon is powerful enough to produce antimatter and transform atoms, leaving a radioactive cloud in its wake. Understanding how all of this happens, however, is a real challenge, given just how quickly multiple high-energy events take place.

Now, researchers have used an instrument attached to the International Space Station to track the physical processes that are triggered by a lightning strike. The work tracks how energy spreads out from the site of a lightning bolt into the ionosphere via an electromagnetic pulse.

Lightning from space

The work relies on a piece of hardware called the Atmosphere–Space Interactions Monitor (ASIM), an ESA-built instrument attached to its lab module on the International Space Station. It's an impressive piece of hardware, tying together two X-ray/gamma-ray detectors, three UV detectors, two optical-wavelength light meters, and two high-speed cameras.

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To counter the growing sophistication of computer attacks, Intel and other chip makers have built digital vaults into CPUs to segregate sensitive computations and secrets from the main engine computers use. Now, scientists have devised an attack that causes the Software Guard Extensions—Intel's implementation of this secure CPU environment to divulge cryptographic keys and induce potentially dangerous memory errors.

Plundervault, as the attack has been dubbed, starts with the assumption that an attacker is able to run privileged software on a targeted computer. While that's a lofty prerequisite, it's precisely the scenario Intel's SGX feature is designed to protect against. The chipmaker bills SGX as a private region that uses hardware-based memory encryption to isolate sensitive computations and data from malicious processes that run with high privilege levels. Intel goes as far as saying that "Only Intel SGX offers such a granular level of control and protection."

But it turns out that subtle fluctuations in voltage powering the main CPU can corrupt the normal functioning inside the SGX. By subtly increasing or decreasing the current delivered to a CPU—operations known as "overvolting" and "undervolting"—a team of scientists has figured out how to induce SGX faults that leak cryptographic keys, break integrity assurances, and potentially induce memory errors that could be used in other types of attacks.

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An Iowa man who plotted to steal an Internet domain name at gunpoint was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison yesterday.

Rossi Lorathio Adams II, a former Iowa State University student who ran a social-media platform featuring "images and videos of young adults engaged in crude behavior, drunkenness, and nudity," repeatedly tried to buy the "doitforstate.com" domain name from a resident of Cedar Rapids. But Adams refused to pay the domain-name owner's $20,000 asking price—and then things got weird.

"In June 2017, Adams enlisted his cousin, Sherman Hopkins Jr., to break into the domain owner's home and force him at gunpoint to transfer doitforstate.com to Adams," a Department of Justice press release said. Hopkins was previously sentenced to 20 years in prison as part of a plea agreement. More details are in the government's trial brief.

Enlarge / Pensacola, home of the Navy's flight school and a cyberwarfare training center, was still reeling from a mass shooting at the Naval Air Station when ransomware hit the city's network. (credit: Paul Harris / Getty Images)

On December 7—less than a day after a mass shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola—the city of Pensacola, Florida, was hit by what was originally described as a generic "cyber incident". A city spokesperson has since confirmed that ransomware had struck a number of the city's servers, taking down phones, email, electronic "311" service requests, and electronic payment systems.

Pensacola, with a population of 52,500 people, is in Florida's Gulf Coast "panhandle."  In addition to being the home of the US Navy's pilot training center, Pensacola is also, perhaps ironically, home of one of the training centers for the Navy's Information Warfare Training Command.

Pensacola public information spokesperson Kacee Lagarde said in a statement that the Pearl Harbor Day ransomware attack began in the early morning. Lagarde said: